Selling Your Silicon Valley Home? Don’t Cut Corners: It Will Cost You!
Saturday, July 31st, 2010Today I showed a newer home in San Jose’s Cambrian Park area to some great first time home buyer clients of mine. The house has a nice location and fine floor plan. Some elements of the home were really appealing. But unfortunately, the sellers hadn’t made their home “show ready“. They cut corners.
As we walked through the property, my clients and I noted places where there was neglect. The items were generally not big, but unfortunately there were many of them. Had the owners brought in a painter to do minor cosmetic changes (patch and paint), the home could have looked “like new”. Instead, it was as if the home were full of red flags. Talk about making a bad impression!
My buyers asked me what I thought, if what we saw would scare me off. No, I told them, they all seemed relatively minor to me, but I did understand their concern. One of them explained that “if we see things like this, we believe that the sellers have not taken good care of their home; what else is wrong that we cannot yet see?”
Confident buyers write offers and tend to write good offers. Nervous buyers who are concerned that there are hidden defects (and therefore hidden costs) either don’t write contracts at all or they write lower offers.
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If you want to sell your Silicon Valley home, you need a good amount of qualified traffic coming through your doors. That is, you want people who really do want to buy a home and who are capable of doing so to have a look at your condo, townhome or house inside as well as out. Should the photos in the MLS and online be non-existent, scarce, or poor, those buyers may reject your home without ever seeing it. It is imperative that your home’s photos nicely showcase your property so that buyers want to come and see more in person.